macrakis@harvard.ARPA (Stavros Macrakis) (01/05/85)
It's interesting to hear of the availability of Ada for PC's. Unfortunately, it appears that none yet exists. Janus/Ada was cited as lacking "tasking, generics, exception handling, multi-dimensional arrays (ouch!), Ada standard strings, operator overloading." I threw away the brochure they sent me because the product was so incomplete, but if I recall correctly, it also lacks discriminants, enumeral overloading, aggregates, named parameters, and several other features. This, gentlemen, is not Ada. > A company called ALSYS is also supposed to be comming out with > an Ada compiler which compiles something near full Ada. Alsys, by the way, is Jean Ichbiah's company. (Ichbiah was Ada's chief designer.) > Commentary > Ada is a huge language and I do not believe that it > would be viable without all of those DoD giga-bucks. I think it's commendable that the DoD has realized that large investments in software technology are necessary. Actually, the investments so far are tiny compared to the amount they spend on programming. > Although Ada is not without its good features, there is > no excuse for its size. In my opinion Modula-2 would > win hands down over Ada but for two things: > 1. There are only a few Modula compilers available.... What do you think that DoD money is being spent for!? Perhaps they should have spent it on Modula instead (I don't think so), but support for a language ends up being as important as its technical qualities-- look at the continued success of Fortran, Basic, and C. It is rational to compromise technical quality for support. (And of course I continue to believe that Ada has the technical quality as well.) > 2. Modula is not a well standardized language as Ada.... Why do you think it took so long to complete the Ada language design? > I think that Ada has taken block structured languages > about as far as they can go. I think that the meaning- > ful language research will concentrate on object > oriented languages (e.g., offshoots of SmallTalk) and > data flow languages. > Ian Kaplan, Loral Data Flow Group Yes, well, read up a bit on Ada and see how such features as packages and tasking and overloading really give you object orientation. -s